These teachers were recruited through the 2016 selection process, based on the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) of 2014, but later their appointments were cancelled by a single judge.
Kolkata, April 28: The Calcutta High Court announced that it will begin hearing on May 7 the appeals filed by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education and others against the cancellation of around 32,000 primary teachers’ jobs.
The matter has now been assigned by the Chief Justice of the High Court to a division bench comprising Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and Justice Reetobroto Kumar Mitra. The division bench stated that it will start hearing the appeals from May 7.
Earlier, on May 12, 2023, a single bench of Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay had ordered the cancellation of appointments of about 32,000 candidates.
These candidates had been recruited through a 2016 selection process based on the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) 2014, even though they had not completed their teachers’ training course at the time of recruitment.
The Primary Education Board and other parties had challenged this order by filing appeals.
During the proceedings, lawyer Pratik Dhar, representing a group of teachers who have been working since February 2017, told the court that they are also among the appellants. He also informed the court that the teachers are still “working in their respective schools”.
Pratik Dhar raised a serious concern, stating that “some documents relied upon by the single bench in passing the order of annulment of service of 32,000 teachers were not revealed to the parties in the matter.”
He argued that this affected the fairness of the earlier judgment.
Senior advocate Kalyan Banerjee, appearing for another group of recruited teachers, claimed that the
“intention of the unsuccessful candidates, who had challenged the recruitment process before the single bench, was that the jobs of all those who were appointed be terminated.”
Banerjee also strongly argued that “if documents relied upon by the single bench in passing the order of annulment of service of 32,000 teachers were not revealed to the parties in the matter as claimed by Dhar, then the judgment of the single bench should be set aside on that score itself.”
Additionally, Advocate General Kishore Dutta, representing the West Bengal Board of Primary Education, assured the court that “the soft copy of the paper book in the matter will be supplied to any of the parties in the appeals on request.”
It is important to mention that, in a different case, the Supreme Court, in a major verdict delivered on April 3, had invalidated the appointment of 25,753 teachers and staff in different West Bengal government-aided schools, calling the recruitment process “vitiated and tainted“.
Later, the Supreme Court allowed those teachers, who were found untainted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), to continue in service. However, it did not extend the services of grade ‘C’ and ‘D’ employees of these schools.
